Self-portrait of Daniel Clowes, courtesy Drawn & Quarterly

Written by DCist Contributor Allen Brooks

The story of a hapless loner who, following the death of his father, forces a family on himself, Wilson at times feels like a Sunday comic strip from a completely screwed-up alternate universe. Author Daniel Clowes (Ghost World, Ice Haven) crafts the journey of this oft-times jerk in a unique, one page = one gag format not typically seen outside of collected newspaper strips.

Wilson is the kind of guy you wish never to meet. He’ll sit next to you, start a conversation, and then berate your boring life. Yet by the end of the book, you’ll find that you wish you had a few more moments with the jerk.

In advance of his appearance at Politics and Prose on Monday, Clowes chatted with DCist about his newest book, why there’s more going on with Charlie Brown than you ever thought, and whether or not The Dark Knight was better than Watchmen. (Hint – only one ended up mentioned in Wilson).

The most visually striking thing about Wilson are the differing artistic styles you’ve chosen throughout the book. Where did that decision come from? Because typically with collected graphic novels, there is a narrative thread told through the art using one consistent style.

Well, when I first came up with the character and started doodling these strips with this character that became Wilson, I was drawing little stick figures and I didn’t have a clear sense of what the actual look of the book was going to be. And I was really just concentrating on the rhythm of it and the way the jokes, or non-jokes as they are, worked and worked together in sequence

When I actually sat down to write it, I tried to devise a master style that would work for the entire book and I kept veering between doing really cartoon-y styles and then going to a much more realistic style, and trying out all these different methods. And as I was doing that I realized that that was the only way to do the entire book. There was no one style that made sense for this book. It would have to be this kind of mosaic approach where you’re seeing kind of different facets of this guy on different days, and kind of separating each strip into its own different universe that’s not necessarily related to the others in sequence.